BillGorman wrote:If I test beta software on a test 'n' tune day and it works fine, can I use the software for the weekend race?
Until the BETA software has been well tested without issues, it is best not to use the BETA software for race events where 'testing' could expose a bug. This can be disruptive to an event and can be a negative for the track and RaceAmerica.
BETA testing often exposes a need to fine tune the enhancement prior to general release. That is the reason behind BETA software. There has been tracks who used BETA software during a race weekend and ran into issues and, of course, blamed the system. One example of this is an enhancement request to automatically accept the race results since 99%+ of the time the results are correct. Seems logical to save time and speed up the throughput at the track by letting the computer accept the results and manually go back and fix any errors afterwards. This feature does require the person operating the PC to know when race results are bad and remember to make the correction. One instance of bad data undetected and uncorrected cause the 'garbage in, garbage out' effect. Uncorrected data used for later rounds of racing can cause all types of issues that look like data corruption. BETA testing feedback resulted in the addition of some error detection by the software to alert the operator and disabled this feature during rounds when the saved results must be correct for further rounds.
Tracks like Caprock in Texas made the decision to use BETA software every weekend eager to use new features. Combined with very little BETA testing, they accepted the risk and ran into all types of issues creating an unstable race environment. For this reason, RaceAmerica has limited even further which customers will receive BETA software for testing.